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Central Planning
Bloomberg has an interesting article discussing two types of Chinese new cities: In 1979, Deng Xiaoping drew a circle on the map around China’s southern coast and created Shenzhen, an experiment in capitalism, according to a popular ode to the former leader. Nearly four decades later, Xi Jinping unveiled his own ambition for an era-defining city, this time perched .. MORE
Education
Why does the adult world seem a lot like high school? Duke University economics professor Timur Kuran has received some deserved publicity lately because of his insights into preference falsification. He recently tweeted about an article in the Wall Street Journal by James Freeman, who cites a promotional blurb that, tweets Kuran, “describes both the .. MORE
History of Economic Thought
You take my friend Fenwick. He is an exceedingly loveable little man. His disposition is so sunny, his character so open, that even the Most Hardened Cynics, of whom my wife is International Chairman, call Fenwick “utterly adorable.” He is the very incarnation of the Boy Scout creed: “trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, .. MORE
Economic Growth
Many western experts have argued that China should switch from a model of investment-led growth to consumption-led growth. Some of their criticism of wasteful Chinese investment seems valid, but it’s not obvious that “more consumption” is the way to think about this issue. Some articles give the impression that there is one group of economists .. MORE
Book Club
People often look at my collection of Liberty Fund books and ask me whether I’ve read them all. I laugh. I wish I could say I’d read all of just the economics titles! (I am a firm believer in the art of tsundoku…) So I was delighted when Pete Boettke chose Arthur Seldon’s under-appreciated The .. MORE
Economic Growth
Something that seems obvious if you think about it for a minute is that a growing population pushing on a finite planet means that resources will become pricier and people will become, on average, poorer. In 2019, Bill Maher, for example, who most people, including me, think is a smart person, stated, “In 1900, .. MORE
Related Post
Our sister website Law & Liberty published an article by Oren Cass, a defender of protectionism (“Free Trade’s Original Myth,” January 3). It is an interesting piece although, I suggest, more from a rhetorical than a social-scientific or even simply logical viewpoint. Let me just discuss one irredeemable flaw. Social anthropomorphism is a first symptom. .. MORE
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Browse our archive of posts by author last nameBooks: Reviews and Suggested Readings
I recently completed a multi-post deep dive into the book Conservatism: A Rediscovery by Yoram Hazony. My own views have relatively little alignment with Hazony on many significant issues. Yet, I suspect that may not have come across in the review itself – my review, I believe, cast Hazony’s work in a very positive light. .. MORE
Labor Market
I don’t remember when I first encountered Claudia Goldin’s work, but I do know that the first piece of hers that I read was her Ely lecture, titled, “The Quiet Revolution that Transformed Women’s Employment, Education, and Family.” It blew me away. And it blew me away not just because it was one of the .. MORE
Cost-benefit Analysis
One of my delights in preparing my recent talk on Adam Smith‘s Wealth of Nations, a talk I’ll post in the next few days, is that I read substantial sections of the book that I hadn’t read before. Whereas I have sometimes thought his prose bogs down, I found many instances with terse, crystal-clear .. MORE
Societies that have finished moulding themselves according to the patrilineal principle have indeed experienced a long and slow tragic cycle. After having invented everything—writing, the state… the first economic globalization, in the Bronze Age—they got bogged down. This great inertia, which we then see in China and India, and in Africa… is one of the .. MORE
The fourth and final Hunger Games movie was released on November 20, bringing the second part of the third book (Mockingjay1) to the big screen. While I’ve found these books and movies entertaining, the value of this enterprise isn’t limited to entertainment. The Hunger Games might contain the best depiction of communism and its cousin—socialism—ever .. MORE
A Liberty Classic Book Review of Discovery, Capitalism, and Distributive Justice, by Israel M. Kirzner.1 Can the distribution of income generated by the market process be regarded as just? The answer to that question depends on the extent to which economic theory accounts for the role of the entrepreneur in the market process. Israel Kirzner .. MORE
One main reason why rational expectations macroeconomics, in particular its implication that the Phillips Curve for anticipated changes in money is vertical even in the short run, caught on was the allegation that the incumbent Keynesian tradition had failed to either control or explain high inflation. “Failed to control,” I suppose, is true, though the .. MORE
Your article is interesting. It shows that with every president back to Reagan they all pass more "economically significant" regs in their last year of office, even Reagan though his increase was less. It looks..
steve, January 9